How to Undo Any Change at Any Time in Photoshop Lightroom

Photoshop Lightroom keeps track of every edit you make to your photo in the
Develop module, and it displays your edits as a running list in the History
panel (in the order in which they were applied). If you want to go back and undo
any step, and return your photo to how it looked at any stage during your
editing session, you can do that with just one click. Unfortunately, you
can’t just pull out one single step and leave the rest, but you can jump
back in time to undo any mistake, and then pick up from that point with new
changes.

Here’s how it’s done:

To see the history of your edits in the Develop module, click the History
panel header in the left-side Panels area to expand it. This action displays a
list of all the changes you’ve made to your currently selected photo in
this editing session, with the most recent changes at the top (see Figure 1). If
you see a scroll bar along the left side, there’s more history in the
list, and you can click the scroll bar and drag downward to reveal the
additional history states.

Move your cursor over one of the history states. As you hover, the small
Navigator panel preview (which appears above the History panel) shows what your
photo looked like at that point in history. (Figure 2 shows that, a few steps
back, I had briefly converted this photo to grayscale. You can see the grayscale
version in the Navigator panel’s preview window.) Use this feature to find
the last version of the image that was correct.

To jump back to what your photo looked like at that particular stage, click
that state in the History panel. Your photo instantly reverts to the selected
state.

By the way, to undo steps, you don’t have to use the History panel; you
can also press Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z) on your keyboard. Each time you press that
key combination, it undoes the previous edit. To move forward (adding back your
edits one by one), press Command-Shift-Z (PC: Ctrl-Y). When you use these
keyboard shortcuts, the specifics of the history undo are displayed in very
large letters near the bottom of your photo, as shown in Figure 3. This
technique is handy because you can instantly see which edits and settings
you’re undoing without having to keep the History panel open all the
time.

During your editing process, if you come to a point where you really like
what you see, you can save that particular moment in time as a snapshot, by
clicking the plus (+) button at the upper right of the Snapshots panel (see
Figure 4). That moment in time is saved to the Snapshots panel, and it appears
with its name field highlighted so that you can give it a name that makes sense
to you. (I named mine "Grayscale Conversion With Tone Curve" so
I’d know that if I clicked that snapshot, that’s what I’d
get—a black-and-white photo with the extra contrast I added using the Tone
Curve panel. You can see my snapshot highlighted in the Snapshots panel in
Figure 4.)

After you’ve created a snapshot, go ahead and continue editing the
photo. At any point, you can go back and click that snapshot to see Photoshop
Lightroom instantly return your photo to how it looked at that moment in
time.

Two quick tips:

If you jump to a snapshot, the History panel lists that jump, too. So, if
you jump to a snapshot and then change your mind, just go back and click the
state before your snapshot.

You don’t have to click a previous History state to save that state as
a snapshot. Instead, you can just Control-click (PC: right-click) any state and
choose Create Snapshot from the context menu that appears (see Figure 5).
Lightroom adds that state as a snapshot without your having to change to that
moment in time. Pretty handy.

Here’s another important thing to know. Let’s say that you decide
to jump back to a snapshot you’ve taken, and then you wind up improving on
the look you had there. For example, I jumped back to that Grayscale Conversion
With Tone Curve snapshot I took earlier, increasing the brightness a bit, and I
like it better. To update your snapshot with your new improved settings, just
Control-click (PC: right-click) the snapshot in the Snapshots panel, and choose
Update With Current Settings from the context menu that appears (see Figure
6).

Ready to start leveraging more power? Suppose you jump back to a snapshot
you’ve created, and you really like the way that photo looks. You might
want to apply the same settings to other photos. For example, I kind of like the
black-and-white conversion I’ve got going in my Grayscale Conversion With
Tone Curve snapshot. You can save all those settings as a preset:

Click the snapshot.

Go to the Presets panel and click the plus (+) sign to add these settings as
a preset.

When the New Develop Preset dialog appears, give your preset a name and
click Create (see Figure 7).

Later, when you open a different photo, you can apply that same conversion
(black-and-white, in my example) to the new photo by going to the Presets panel
and clicking your new preset. Note that you’re only seeing a preview of
the conversion in the Navigator panel up top in Figure 8, because I didn’t
actually click the preset—I’m just hovering my cursor over it so I
can see a preview before I commit. How cool is that?

A separate history is kept for each individual photo. If you change to a
different photo, it gets its own separate list of history states. If you return
to the previous photo, that photo’s history states will still be intact in
the History panel.